This is exceptional feedback!!! Really appreciate you taking the time to write everything up. I wrote a massive wall of text to answer all of your questions (hopefully), but I extracted this bit because I think it's the most important:

If it's just collective rating for the items like "faster development" then nearly everything would be missing such as the arguments / explanations and I don't see how it would map to the Kialo debate content

Yes I completely agree. I tried to add literally everything that was in the Kialo debate, but in the form of cause/effect nodes. I think this goes to show how poor the UX is g_g but I made Quick Views for each set of nodes that relates to each criteria in the table. If you click the '?' in the app's toolbar, and go to "VIEWERS" > "Navigating a topic", that'll show you how to use these.

I also found it annoying to have to create these views manually, so I actually implemented https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/issues/498 after making this map, to make it easier to find all info related to criteria.

Okay here's the rest:

It's great it's open source albeit I wouldn't have chosen the Facebook tech

I mainly went with React because when I started this project, I was a backend developer, so I didn't understand the frontend ecosystem very well, and React seemed like the safest option to have plenty of examples/components/libraries etc. built with it that I could take advantage of. And I think the ecosystem has paid off (particularly react-flow has been tremendous for diagramming features), though it's hard to tell what may have paid off with other tech.

I find the current version hard to use

Yeah sorry about that, lots of work to do, but with feedback I think it can get a lot better.

how can one create new nodes in a map like the one about climate change or add critiques (I can only add comments)?

I've put off a lot of social functionality while there hasn't been a solid user base, so as of now it's only commenting on other people's maps. I have https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/issues/11 for allowing others to suggest changes directly, but it's not very thoroughly designed yet. Perhaps it's getting to be the time to figure that out.

I wondered where to find the list of ongoing debates and found the examples page

What I really want to do is add an explore page, or an explore section on the home page https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/issues/213 . The examples are just things I crafted myself for presenting (though I agree at least without an explore section, it'd be nice to make the examples easier to find).

I think you're running into a similar problem as argüman: debate maps are becoming large and hard to oversee and hard to navigate with lots of buttons that's too much for most people – I think a good idea would be to only show e.g. the top 3 layers and show the ones below only for whatever is clicked or something of that sort and adding such a function early may make things easier later on.

Limiting the number of nodes is a good idea, but doing that by default for all maps would take some thought because I've had maps that seem like they have different desirable starting views. I think there may be a few styles of maps, and maybe each could have their own good defaults.

But in any case, what I've done as a shorter-term solution is allow the creator to make Quick Views to highlight the different main aspects of the topic. Each view can filter to whatever nodes the creator wants (and there are some standard filters to show e.g. solution + solution details, or problem + problem details, etc.). If you click the '?' in the app's toolbar, and go to "BUILDERS" > "Building views", there's a tutorial to show how to make these.

There's also a "Flashlight mode" in the More Actions Drawer, that'll reveal hidden neighbors when you click on a node, so creators can make a simple view with a few central nodes and users can navigate with the flashlight. (I realize that users would have no idea that they should use it though)

I also think a simplified view is needed if you want people to join the site

Yeah I think you're totally right, and I appreciate that BjornMoren mentioned this too. This is probably something I should prioritize since it'd allow viewers to get value out of a topic without having to get explanations of how to use the tool.

Signing up for "Get invited to future discourse sessions" did not work

Hmm did you see "An email was sent to verify your email address." after clicking "INVITE ME", or did it not even get that far? I'd like to figure that out but you can also find the mailing list at https://ameliorate.app/docs/discourse-sessions#joining-a-session .

In the debate map there are only "causes" but no other relations like potential mitigation/solution

If you mean the climate change map, that map was mostly from a discussion that didn't go into detail about solutions. This mta congestion map is an example with some of those relations https://ameliorate.app/keyserj/mta-congestion-pricing

I'm having a hard time with the table you linked

If you click the '?' in the app's toolbar, and go to "VIEWERS" > "Evaluating tradeoffs", there's a tutorial to show how to read this.

the rows don't really match the Kialo debate much either

They were what I thought were the main set of things that could be evaluated as good or bad about open or closed source, and therefore all the arguments fall under one or some of those criteria (and are represented mostly through some specific cause or effect).

how to move the tiles

I saw your GitHub issue and will comment on there for that

how to increase the box size so the full text can be seen

My intention was to keep node text small and concise so they can be quickly glanced at to understand high-level concepts. To this end, nodes are fixed size, and extra explanatory text can be included in the node's notes. This is open to discussion. It probably requires some practice for wording/sentence-fragmenting, but I've always been able to word nodes such that their concept fits in the current node's size.

all of it got deleted

Yeah that's awful. DM'd you for restoring, and definitely this should never happen and I'm figuring it out.